Fast Company

Alex Lidow, scion of an engineering dynasty, thinks the essential material at the heart of the tech industry needs to change.

In 1977, when he was 22 years old, inventor Alex Lidow had the sort of eureka moment most techies would kill for. While in graduate school at Stanford, Lidow co-invented, along with Thomas Herman, a type of device called the HEXFET power MOSFET that would make his family’s old company, International Rectifier, more than $930 million in royalties. And it turned Lidow’s grandfather, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, and his father, who fled Berlin in 1937, into important players in the hardware industry.

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The higher you climb in your career, the less you understand the next generation of employees, which is why reverse mentoring is important.

Good leaders connect with employees, but the longer you’re at a company, the harder it can be to relate to a new generation of hires. Sri Shivananda, vice president of global platform and infrastructure at PayPal and former vice president of global platform and infrastructure at eBay, has resolved the issue through reverse mentoring—learning from his junior employees.

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Sweden’s latest experiment with a six-hour workday is going well, but could reduced hours ever fly in our workaholic culture?

Fringe ideas are fringe ideas until they aren’t. When reformers started to push for child-labor laws around a century ago, it looked like an outside shot. So did a $15 minimum wage, before Vice President Joe Biden and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took up the cause a few weeks ago. (It still does—and some say it’s a bad idea in the first place—but it’s come a long way in a short time.) Not to be outdone, Berkeley, California, is now pressing to require a $19 hourly wage, and one CEO promised employees a $70,000 minimum salary earlier this year.

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Remember when you used your phone to talk to people? Could a text-only communication habit be hurting how others view you?

With everything we use our smartphones for, it can be easy to forget that the devices were once used for actually talking to other human beings. With our voices. Many of us have become accustomed to communicating with coworkers and clients almost exclusively using email and instant messages. But if you work in an office where people still talk to each other, could this habit hurt you professionally?

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At last, an app-savvy wearable for your wrist that no sane person would describe as “chunky.”

Read enough reviews of smartwatches, and you may notice a theme:

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Uber launched a long-distance carpooling option for commuters in Chengdu, China.

Now that China’s leading ride-hailing company, Didi Kuaidi, has forged a partnership with Lyft, Uber is facing pressure to step up its game in the region. Though Uber has already invested about $1 billion in the Chinese market—and has seen significant growth there, with its Chinese drivers serving about 1 million rides per day—Lyft’s new alliance could hamper the company’s progress, since Didi Kuaidi already looms large over Uber in China.

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The Pope’s U.S. visit later this week is disrupting life in and around Philadelphia—including postal deliveries.

Seldom do two Western religions clash quite this directly. But for some devotees of the Church of Cupertino, this weekend’s Papal visit to the East Coast could bring some devastating news: Your new iPhone might take a few extra days to get to you.

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You can lead a kid to healthier foods, but you can’t make him take a bite.

Ever since the introduction of mandatory fruits and vegetables for schoolchildren, kids have eaten less of them than before. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, introduced in 2010 and in effect from last year, forces schoolchildren to take a piece of fruit or a vegetable and put it on their lunch tray. What it does’t do is force them to eat it. A new study shows that kids toss their apples into the trash before they even take a place at a table.

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Storehouse, a mobile publishing network by an ex-Apple designer, has decided that followers create pandering, and pandering ruins everything.

When the iPad app Storehouse launched in early 2014—designed as a way to publish brief, uniquely laid out, photo-driven stories with the world—it operated with all of the flourish you’d expect an app led by an ex-Apple designer to have. The company was founded by Mark Kawano, who had worked on iPhoto and served as Apple’s user experience evangelist before founding his company, and it showed.

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It seems the attack that hit last June was even worse than we thought.

Since it was announced in June that hackers had breached the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) database, the full breadth of the crippling cyberattack has gone from bad to worse. First, there was the revelation that the government’s initial claims that data had been stolen from just 4.4 million current and former government employees was a gross underestimate. In fact, the actual number was closer to 22 million affected employees, many of whom provided extremely personal information to the OPM—including social security numbers, birth dates, and statements on their sex lives, mental health history, and drug use—while applying for government jobs. As a result, OPM head Katherine Archuleta resigned the next day.

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